Made at Harvard University (where Heaney was Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory), the drawing relates to a painting commissioned by a private collector.

In Autumn 2018, five years after Seamus Heaney's death, the Royal Society of Literature and the National Portrait Gallery celebrated the lasting power of Heaney's verse, his ability to 'credit marvels', and his enduring presence in the work of poets writing now. Poets Inua Ellams and Sinéad Morrissey, as well as novelist and friend of Seamus Heaney, Andrew O'Hagan, were commissioned to respond to portraits of Seamus Heaney held by the National Portrait Gallery, drawing upon both the images themselves as well as the ways in which Seamus Heaney’s writing has influenced their own work. We are grateful to the T. S. Eliot Estate for sponsoring this project.

Portrait of SeamusI remember him using the phrase 'merry commotion'. It seemed right for the kind of music that depends on a fiddle and a bodhran, the soft Irish drum the musicians touch with a wooden stick called a tipper. The bodhran is an evolution of the tambourine, today without its jingling coins or its streamers, but its round frame can still be made of willow wood, and when you touch the skin lightly it is much closer to the beat of the heart, two thousand years closer, perhaps, than loud speeches or the big bass drum. When you recited a poem in front of Seamus, his fingers would massage the air, as if feeling for the document itself, as if conducting a score amid the oxygen your shared. And it is that Seamus, the riddler of music, that I look for in all the portraits that have been done. There are some that show the stately Seamus, the Nobel Laureate, the windswept son of Erin, but my eye is drawn to what the ear knows better, to the antic pen and brush, the charcoal and the pencil. Ross Wilson's studies for 'Seamus Heaney at Harvard', done in 1994 and part of the National Portrait Gallery's collection, have for me what Seamus himself found so necessary to a poem, 'phonetic purchase or rhythmical promise.' You must attend to the energy of the thing, with 'an ear to the line'. Wilson's studies include several of a smiling Seamus: we see a mad spray of hair, a symphony of thought, squiggle and shadow. For me they construct a thoughtfulness and they capture with vivacity the poetical mind. In my Scottish schools, such art, we learned, has a unity of form and content, the portraitist dealing in forms that gladly meet and match the smiling occasion. Andrew O'Hagan

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